The religious having nothing to fear from secularism

In an earlier article, I reflected on why so many religious people felt threatened by atheism, especially the so-called "new atheism" associated with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and company.

I cited the language typically used by their religious opponents: the new atheism is out to "destroy," "annihilate," "kill" or "suppress" religion; it seeks to drive religion from the public square and has "totalitarian" tendencies; it is comparable to the exterminations of Nazis and Communists last century; and so on.

I suggested that this reaction was odd because there was not, in fact, the vaguest suggestion in the recent atheist literature of extreme measures against religion.

Moreover, there are no signs that secular states - in which there is no official state religion, or where the state accommodates but is neutral in respect of religion - are disposed to curtail religious activity. Quite the contrary, if recent developments in public education in Australia may be instanced.

I also noted that although the moderate centres of the major religions were under pressure from their radical or fundamentalist fringes, schisms and various voguish supernaturalist trends, the global religious constituency is predicted to grow.

The poor religious tropics will continue to be fruiful and multiply, and, though understandably arousing clerical anxiety, people who "abandon" regular worship in an organised religion rarely lurch into atheism; they usually lapse into some woolly form of supernaturalism (of the "I believe there is some higher power; something out there" variety).

People are, of course, still harrassed, persecuted and murdered, sometimes with state connivance, for reasons that stem from religious hatred. Coptic Christians in Egypt, Sunnis in Shiite lands and Shiites in Sunni ones spring to mind.

It is difficult to think of contemporary instances of such religious persecution in secular states. China might be thought a major exception. That state is not really secular in the sense understood here but it has been described by religious advocates such as Alistair McGrath as part of the great "empire of atheism," and so may seem roughly to fit the bill. It does not, I think, for two reasons.

The body of Chinese society has never relinquished a variety of recognisably religious conformations, although government has tried to dis-organise and restrict religious expression to personal devotion and spiritual development.

This has certainly created conflict, especially with centrally organised and authoritarian religions such as Catholicism and Falun Gong. But the state's suppression of unsanctioned religious expression is only incidentally religious persecution: the object of the state's persecution is not qua religion, but qua political dissidence.

The effect may be much the same, but its cause is not religious hatred but political anxiety. Similar points could be made about Chinese treatment of Tibetan Buddhists, Germany's suspicion of Scientology and the suspicion of fringe cults everywhere.

The religious have little to fear from the fully secular state. Indeed, a secular state is the best protection a religion in a religiously heterogeneous nation can have.

Yet it is clear that many of the religious, especially at the fundamentalist end of the spectrum, do feel menaced by secular states which they experience as corrosively atheist.

Witness the United States, where Christians of many stripes have behaved in recent decades as if waking to a nightmare in which they suddenly discover that their government was no longer Christian - which of course it never was, except in their confined understandings.

And the angst is provoked not only by the character of the state and its institutions, but by perceptions of creeping social secularization: of depletion in the ranks of the mainstream religions, fragmentation of faiths, divorce between morality and religion, indifference to traditional spiritual concerns, disrespect for religious heritage, and, of course, a more outspoken and aggressive atheism.

Such secularization is occurring, especially in educated and prosperous demographics, East and West. But it is far from evident why such developments rationally should be believed as threatening the religious. Social secularization is not a contagious disease or an oppressive political movement, and it usually comes under the auspices and with the guarantees of the secular state.

Yet lurid perceptions of secularization and aggressive atheism have been transformed in many a religious mind into a kind of amorphous menace, a source of persecution. How does that arise?

"the cultural power of the persecution narrative lies deep in Christian history and theology. To be persecuted is a sign of holiness. Christ Himself warned His followers they would be despised for His sake. Some Christians ask, if this sinful world is not persecuting me, am I really on the right path? When perceived persecution comes, it is to be embraced as a sign that one's convictions are right and any wavering unthinkable."

This account may be specific to Christians but is not plausible as a general explanation: it does not explain the tendency of Jews, Muslims and others to feel persecuted, and many surely do, even when they're not, or not, at any rate, because of their religion.

(It is understandable why Muslim citizens in the Middle East would feel that the West had it in for them; but it doesn't follow from the West's aggression that, as many Muslims believe, the West has it in for them because they are Muslims.)

And there is a deeper difficulty. There is a general disposition in humankind to claim persecution and use it to advantage to provoke sympathy. But we do not seek confirmation of our views in the adversity of persecuted singularity; on the contrary, we seek it in solidarity and efforts to secure like-mindedness.

That is partly why most religions proselytize and try to isolate or eliminate the apostate, heretic and infidel. We feel we are right when multitudes agree with us; rarely when we stand alone.

Croome, however, almost touches on something that is correct and to which we will return: it doesn't follow from being persecuted that you are right, but it does follow in a kind of paranoid logic that you are important.

That kind of misconstrual is probably the kernel of truth in a common explanation for the rise of religious extremism or fundamentalism.

Many commentators argue that fundamentalism is a reaction to the real threat of modernity. It is a striving, against the winds of relativism and nihilism, to regain the old certainties.

On this view, the religious who take the fundamentalist turn may see themselves as so besieged by secular modernity, their very existence or way of life being under threat, that they're prepared to turn to violence to defend themselves.

Now, this perception of imminent threat is certainly a misperception. (I think it is a motivated misperception but that is not a line of argument I will pursue here.) To reiterate, in democratic secular societies ensuring freedom of worship, the survival of religious identity is not under direct threat.

The threat that is real and provokes the anxiety of the fundamentalists is not to survival, but to the primacy of their religion, in which they wish to be seen as the vanguard of excellence, and on which their self-esteem, through intense identification, often precariously depends.

It is this shock of demotion that many religious people experience when the immense variety of the world suddenly opens up to them - as through the agency of the media in many Muslim countries - or when they realise that their values are no longer recognised as dominant - as in the United States, and to a much lesser degree Australia.

It is in large part the loss of self-esteem and respect - humiliation is an axis of torment especially in the Muslim world - that motivates withdrawal into fundamentalist, often delusional and violent pockets of resistance.

Another, milder version of the "real threat" account comes from the school of cultural decline, of which Scott Stephens's recent editorial will serve as an example, though not an ideal one.

The general idea is that the modern world is undergoing a phase of cultural impoverishment and disintegration principally associated with the loss of religion, nihilism and atheism.

"Our real problem today is the impoverishment of the modern mind, our inability to think properly about such elevated things as the Good, Beauty, Truth, Law, Love, Life, Death, Humanity, the End or Purpose of things, even Sex itself, without such ideas being debased by an incurious and all-pervasive nihilism ... It is apparent, is it not, that the current batch of chic atheists are but a symptom of a more general cultural decline ... It is just as apparent why such an atheism - with its cartoon versions of history, its theological illiteracy, it fetishisation of science, its hostility to the humanities and aesthetics, its flattened-out brand of morality as mere "well-being," its cheap gags and mode of incessant piss-taking cynicism - should appeal so powerfully to a culture that has grown accustomed to the vulgarities and trivia enshrined in the modern media ... And this atheism, I believe, will continue to flourish to the extent that moral disintegration, nihilistic capitalism, anti-aesthetic liberalism and a kind of ubiquitous piss-taking cynicism remain the dominant forces in our common life."

Stephens's view is not quite typical because he does not blame (the new) atheism for the decline: "To make such a claim would be to accord this variety of atheistic chic with too much importance, too much weight."

But it is clear that he sees decline and atheism as a kind of package deal, each reinforcing the other.

Stephens is clearer about the signs of disintegration then about its causes, but if I may read between the lines the causal story, I suggest, runs in part like this: Judeo-Christianity has been the foundation of Western culture and the recession of this religion or "our inability to think" seriously about the serious matters that historically formed the substance of its discourse - the Good, Life, Death, Purpose, and so on - have cast us into our present dire condition, of which the new atheism is a rank symptom.

The threat, then, facing religious and irreligious alike, is the impending cultural catastrophe engendered by the impoverishment of the modern mind, strongly associated with the recession of religion, and symbolized by the rise of a new, brash and superficial atheism.

There is an unwritten principle in my discipline that when a philosopher uses the collectives "we," "our" and "us" then prepare for a sleight of hand. And indeed: who is this "us" who cannot think about Good, Beauty, Truth, God without the incursion of a debasing nihilism? Were there better and brighter spirits in other ages - in Augustine's or Aquinas's or Newman's - who were less impoverished than "we" poor modern sods?

No, this story of moral and intellectual decline is a myth predicated on a failure to distinguish the serious discourse of the best science, philosophy, art and other disciplines which properly define (high) culture, and what we are pleased to call "popular culture" and Stephens refers to as "our common life."

There has never been a day before our time with more serious and penetrating thought about the cosmos, our selves and our relations to others and to the cosmos. And it is a fact that most of that thought has taken place in the ambience of scientific fallibilism, methodological skepticism, cautious scholarship and their consequence: atheism.

Inevitably, this thought has become complex and specialised and now scarcely impinges on a popular culture which is in any case practically stupefied by consumerism and superficial entertainments in prosperous parts of the globe, and by crippling poverty in others.

(In case you are wondering, I consider the recent atheist polemics by Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett and their ilk as belonging in the popular field, as clearly intended by their authors. But Dawkins, Dennett and many of the others weighing in have of course made important contributions in their own disciplines.)

There are today many cultures (adapting C.P. Snow's image) tracing ever divergent paths. It may be that Stephens is worrying only about popular culture. But popular culture, also diverse, has not been debased either; it has never amounted to much, though perhaps even it is in some respects more promising today than in earlier times, despite its obvious vulgarities.

If we are to be afraid, it should not be because the "modern mind" is impoverished, being largely devoid of religious concerns as traditionally conceived. There is no modern mind. So where does the truth about religious anxiety lie?

Very briefly I would say this, taking up some earlier threads. In recent years there has been, for a variety of reasons, a marked loss of respect for religion, and not just among those who disdain it but even amongst those who continue to embrace their religion. For people who value their religion and are strongly identified with it the sense that their religion no longer attracts respect means that they themselves feel no longer respected.

This assault on self-esteem is likely to mobilise what psychoanalysts refer to as the paranoid-schizoid position, a complex constellation of relations to objects (people) in which what is outside one is experienced as bad and persecutory, and the good inside one, what is most precious, is felt to be under threat from without - as if what is most precious, what is held most closely to heart, is about to be destroyed or stolen.

I believe that something like this emotional constellation underlies much of the sort of religious anxiety and hyperbolic apologetical language that I have been considering. (This way of experiencing the world is not of course restricted to the religious.)

The recent flood of atheist literature has reinforced the perception that religion is under assault, though I suspect that its effect in undermining respect for religion has been insignificant in comparison to the sins of Catholic clergy, the violence of Muslim fundamentalists or the stupidity of some American evangelicals.

In fact the inability of some prominent atheists to distinguish between disrespecting an ideology or practice such as religion and disrespecting the person who holds the religious ideology has tarnished their work and is almost certainly counterproductive to their cause.

But, finally, I would say that atheism announces a truth, a rather terrible truth, and perhaps most terrible for those who have managed to live in the sight of God but are now forced in good conscience to reconsider their beliefs in fear and trembling. That worm in the rose may be the greatest source of religious anxiety.

Tamas Pataki is honorary senior fellow at the University of Melbourne and honorary fellow of Deakin University. His most recent book is Against Religion (Scribe, 2007), and he is a contributor to The Australian Book of Atheism (Scribe, 2010).